Dividing a generation?: New Zealand university students' perspectives on debt

The scale of student debt in New Zealand and abroad is unprecedented. However, relatively little is known about how students understand and negotiate debt in the present. In this article, I report on interviews with 70 students enrolled at New Zealand's eight universities to understand the multiple ways students describe their debt and how it affects them. The analysis of the interviews reported presents five clusters of student experiences of debt. This variation suggests debt may create multiple and overlapping fractures as well as vulnerabilities among students, affecting both students with and without debt.